


Vertex

by Cluegirl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-17
Updated: 2011-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-24 17:33:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy hates nothing more than a serene Harry Potter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vertex

It was Harry Potter's birthday, and so of course there were fireworks. Sparkling dragons swooped and dove in the sky over Diagon alley (and every other Wizarding district, in every other town in Britain, most likely, and muggles bedamned if they spotted it.) Snitches buzzed and smoked and exploded into showers of tickling gold. Silver wolves chased green death eaters into grizzling sparks, and everywhere, flowers of light and fire bloomed into the summer's not-quite-night.

It was ridiculous.

All that for one stupid Gryffindor's bloody birthday, and he hadn't even showed up for the speeches. They'd had fireworks like this last autumn, of course, after Potter had finally got off his arse and done the Dark Lord in, and those, Draco could understand. He'd fired off a couple bursts of silver-sparkling relief himself back then, but this? This was just disgusting.

Fawning hero worship was what it was; every street full of half drunken idiots, all wearing those stupid buttons that flashed _Potter Rocks!_ The Weasley twins just _had_ to be responsible for those. Nobody else would possibly think such unbearably tacky things were worth a second thought, let alone worth making hundreds of the damned things and handing them out for free to every Witch and Wizard in the streets that night!

And of course, because the Weasleys were involved, the lettering charm was tied into the sticking charm. Bloody clowns were a menace to all sense of taste and dignity. Always had been. Damn it.

Draco twisted his collar more firmly down over the glowing badge, and scowled savagely into the milling crowd. Granger and Weasley and Longbottom and the rest had all melted into the crowd some time ago, and from his vantage from the roof of Olivander's, he had been able to keep them all in sight as, one by one and in pairs, they left the public riot of adoration for whatever private ones they had planned.

Potter never appeared. Never once. And now it was coming on toward midnight. Draco was going to have to go home, admit to Severus that he'd been right, and Draco had been wasting his time, and then... (he swallowed equal measures of rage and disgust) then he was going to have to get his lover's help in removing that damned badge. He thought for a moment about throwing the robe away before he went home, then discarded the notion; Severus would find out about it anyhow, and then he'd shout about wasted money as well as wasted time. He'd point out that Draco wasn't rich anymore, and couldn't go about acting as though money sprouted like mushrooms in his Gringotts vault, when Severus had told him from the beginning that it was a fool's errand, but no, Draco just had to go and prove it himself that Potter wasn't going to let himself be found just for the price of a few sparklers and a round of 'For He's A Jolly Good Fellow."

Draco really didn't want a telling off to go with the coming dressing down. He'd risked death and torture for the man he loved, and would do so again, if needed, but he wasn't stupid enough to fight with Severus if it could be avoided.

But... he'd been so certain. What kind of an egotist didn't bother to come to his own birthday party? Not even Potter could be so rude... only it seemed that Potter had been exactly that rude. And what was worse, nobody in Diagon Alley seemed to think it WAS rudeness. He'd overheard snatches of their conversations while he'd waited, had curled his lip at the excuses they all made; oh, he's not one for public life much; he doesn't like the spotlight; he's still recovering, you know; I'm sure he'll make it next year.

Draco wanted to shout down at them. Potter wasn't recovering from anything. He hadn't even been wounded last Autumn, thanks to Severus and him. And he sure as bloody hell wasn't shy of the spotlight! He'd strutted about like a peacock during the whole Tri-Wizarding Tournament, and how could anybody forget that? How could the idiots not see that this pretence of shyness was really just another Potter sized publicity stunt?

The badge gave another of its timed buzzes, and Draco snarled. " _Finite incantatem_ , you piece of rubbish!" But, as before, the charm only made the badge glow brighter. Only now there was the faint smell of scorching wool as well. Bloody lovely.

"I'd try a cooling charm on the cloth, actually," came a voice from behind him. "Freezing charm might even mess up the sticking spell altogether if George cast it."

Draco whirled on his heel, wand out and sparking. Overhead, an enormous Whomping Willow lashed sizzling across the sky, glaring from Potter's ugly round glasses as the wind fluttered his grayish cloak fully off his shoulders. He wasn't wearing robes, just muggle jeans and a football shirt, and he held only that strange cloak in his hands -- far too light to be worth a sneeze for warmth, even on a summer night like this one.

"What are you doing here?" Draco didn't drop his wand, didn't drop his guard as he faced his old foe.

Potter shrugged, glanced up as a garish Gryffindor lion went roaring over. "I came to find you," he said, and Draco had to suppress a shiver at that voice he had now; as though two people were speaking over each other, and one of them in Parseltongue. "Thought you might need something." He cocked his head. "Do you? Either of you?"

"We're not part of your fan club, Potter," Draco bit out. "We need nothing from you!"

There was a moment of stillness, as though even the fire in the sky were startled. And then another crackle, another fizz, and Potter nodded. "Okay." Then he turned his back. He turned his back, and he walked away, and for a moment, all Draco could feel was relief.

Then anger shot up his spine with a roar, and he was running. Five strides, shoes crunching on the slates, Potter half turning, looking back with the sky-fire veiling his eyes in green. He grunted in soft surprise when Draco shouldered him into the stairwell with all his weight.

"Give me a reason, Potter," Draco snarled down at him, jabbing his wand hard under the ridge of Potter's jaw, and pinning the smaller man with all his weight as well. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't curse you dead and leave you for your fans to find in the morning!"

And he could do it, too, he realized as he plucked Potter's wand from his sleeve. Nobody knew Potter was up here, let alone that Draco was with him. There'd be no witness, and Draco wouldn't even have to use his own wand to do it. No one would ever know that-

"I can't," Potter's double voice shook him out of it. One bony shoulder flexed upward under his chest; a shrug, of sorts. "Sorry. But if you're serious about killing me, I'd rather like to know why you want to before you do it, if it's all the same to you." The little bastard sounded amused, and Draco couldn't possibly have hated him more. But he also couldn't have killed him, and they both knew that.

He dropped his wand, and stepped back. "Don't play stupid, Potter," he spat. "We know what you did!"

Potter sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and at last began to look put out. "Everybody knows most things I do, Malfoy, thanks to Skeeter. I can't really stop her, you know, but it's not as if anybody's forcing you to take the papers and read it-"

"You told them not to bother us, Potter," Draco cut him off with a furious slash of his wand, stepping back as sparks dripped across his scuffed shoes. "On National Wireless you told the Witches and Wizards of England to bloody well _forgive_ us!" He spat the word and its foul taste from his mouth, and even Potter flinched at it. "You ordered them to do it, Scarhead, and now they are!"

"Look, Malfoy," Potter showed his teeth in return, his voice sizzling with quiet strain. "I never _ordered_ anyone to do anything. She asked my opinion about you two, and I gave it. You two paid your dues as much as any of the rest of us did, and if you made mistakes, you also did more to bring about Voldemort's fall than most Witches and Wizards in England did." He gave that half shrug again, and boosted his chin. "That's all I said, and that's all I meant."

Draco saw red, and it wasn't from the burst of roses to the north. "Bloody Gryffindor! What the devil makes you think you know what we did? You don't know a bloody _thing_ about what we went through to-"

"Draco."

"-too busy larking about with your precious Order! Never once tried to even find out if we were still _alive_ , let alone-"

"Draco!" Potter lunged, caught his elbow, and shook him silent. "I know. You two were sabotaging the Death Eaters all along, turning them against each other, making them slip up when it really counted." The hand on his elbow didn't crush, didn't pinch or grip, but somehow still held him as still as any chain of magic or iron. "I also know you were undermining the horcrux defenses, and I know you almost got caught at it more than once." Potter's thumb slid along the crease of his elbow, weighty and smooth. "I know."

Draco shivered as a blue screamer roared past. "How?" he asked, staring at Potter's hand until it loosened and dropped away.

"Not relevant, really," Potter mumbled. He might as well have said 'Voldemort's memories told me,' but of course the bloody ninny would never admit to it. "I just know. And you know it's the truth, so I don't see why the rest of the world shouldn't know it too."

Flustered, Draco grit his teeth. "And so we're meant to owe you now, is that it? You use the Dark Lord's power to get us out of trouble, so all we get from the Ministry's a slap on the wrist, and-"

"They took your inheritance," Potter replied, and somehow didn't sound smug. "And Snape's property as well. That's hardly a slap on the wrist."

"They didn't put us in Azkaban, you idiot!" Draco shouted. "That's what using Unforgivables _means_! Prison for life, not a fine and a probation!"

And now Potter looked amused, damn it. "No Slytherin can possibly believe it's that simple," he said. "You know it has more to do with politics than law. This time there's justice involved as well. Consider what you two went through last year as Time Served, if it makes you feel better."

"And find ourselves beholden to you?" Draco shook his head. "You wish!"

Potter made a frustrated sound, and he might have spoken, only at that moment, a huge phoenix burst across the sky, scarlet and vermilion and cerise, and amber and cinnabar and gold and sulfur and diamond white. It sang as it went; a faint mockery of true phoenix song, but a nice trick all the same.

When it had faded away, Potter sighed again, and said in that quiet, rainfall voice, "Not everything is about you, Malfoy."

"What the hell do you want from us then?"

Another shrug, and that aggravating half-smile he was always giving in the papers these days. "I don't know. I'd say I don't want anything from you, but I know you wouldn't believe me anyway. Still, thinking of something to make you feel better isn't a pressing concern for me right now, so-"

"Oh, that's right, isn't it?" Draco made his voice sharp, and went for blood. "Won the war and lost the bird, didn't you? Did the Weaslette decide she didn't want to marry the next Dark Lord then, Potter? Is that what put the most anticipated wedding of the year down the bog?"

His face went hard. Draco gripped his wand in his right hand, Potter's in his left. But Potter only looked down, and that unruly black mop hid his expression for a long moment, until he shrugged again. "Something like that, yeah."

Stunned, Draco watched the light of a thousand blue dragonflies play over the hard jaw, the angled cheek, the scarred temple. He looked like a man. Just a man, like a thousand others, if a bit thinner, smaller, sadder. Not a Dark Lord, not a conqueror waiting for a target, not a time bomb at all. Draco wet his lips. "Then. Then you admit it? You admit you're-"

"No, Malfoy," Potter shook his head. "I'm not going to take Voldemort's place. That's your fantasy, not mine." Then he held out his hand, palm up, so the crescent moon scar was puckered and stark in the cradle of it. "My wand?"

Draco gritted his teeth, and clenched his fist hard around the wand. "Not on your life, Scarhead," he snarled. "I'm not done with-"

Potter's dry laugh cut him off. "Yes you are. You didn't get what you expected from me, and you can't think of anything else to accuse me of, so now you're just goading, and hoping I'll rise to something and give you an opening."

Appalled, Draco took a step back, and frantically tried to occlude his mind. "You're- You've no right! Get out!"

"Sorry," he said, and actually sounded as though he meant it. "It's your mark. I can't really help it unless you occlude when you're around me."

"The mark," Draco stopped his hand creeping toward his left arm, stopped himself remembering how the Dark Lord's eyes used to seem as though they could look right into his soul, how Severus had taught him to think an endless cycle of that silly Slytherin lullaby whenever he was in the Dark Presence. Instead, he stared at Potter, no older than himself, and yet somehow so very ancient. Even Severus seemed younger.

Draco shivered. "Then you can... Any of them?" He swallowed hard. "All of them?"

"Some of them, yeah," Potter admitted what Draco never thought he would have. Never in a million years. "If I focus, and clear my mind. He built it into the Mark when he designed it." He shook his head. "Paranoid bastard, even back then."

"Then why the fuck," Draco said each word perfectly, crisply, lest so much as a syllable should escape into the buzzing, sparking, crowd-roaring, drunken night, "-are the Aurors still hunting for escaped Death Eaters out there?" What he didn't scream was ' _Why does our flat have to be hidden under Fidelis? Why do I have to look over my shoulder every time I leave it? Why do we have to live under so many wards I can hardly stand to breathe, when you could make it all go away?_

The look Potter gave him made Draco occlude that much harder.

"I haven't led the Aurors to the few Death Eaters that are left, because I'm not ready to turn them over to a man like Minister Scrimgeour," Potter answered at last.

The Minister, every inch a Gryffindor icon, from grizzled mane to the careful compliment his robes always paid to anyone in those house colours who might happen to be standing close by him. At his side. Under his large, velveted paw. Draco shook off the image of the man's scowl earlier that evening as he'd surveyed the crowd from the dais, and pretended to listen to the speeches given by the 'other' heroes of the war.

"Potter, you idiot, they're Death Eaters," he said. "Any of them would have killed you in a second, if they'd been ordered to!"

"I know that. But it's not about what _they_ deserve, Malfoy, don't you get that yet?" He made a loose fist, and thumped it against his heart. "It's about _us_. How we treat our enemies defines us as a race every bit as much as how we treat our friends. Azkaban... it destroys people. Their minds, their souls, their bodies. It's worse than a death sentence, because it's a lifetime of slow torture."

Draco closed his eyes, remembering the huddled, wasted body of his father when they had summoned him to the prison to collect it. Pneumonia, they said. As though any wizard died of such muggle diseases where there was so much as an idiot with a wand and a basic healing charm nearby. As though any adult wizard should weigh under a hundred pounds when food charms were easy enough for a third year to master. As though Lucius Malfoy should go to his pyre smelling as if he'd not seen soap for years... Draco swallowed hard, and forced himself to listen.

"Anybody who might have had a chance to repent what they've done, they lose it all in there," Potter was saying. "And that doesn't count the people like Sirius, and Hagrid, and Stan Shunpike, who weren't even guilty to begin with. It isn't right, and I'm not... I don't want to have any part of it." He spread his hands, as though that explained all.

Another explosion, and a roar of passing light; some sort of blue, muggle auto this time, ridiculous sight to find soaring over one's head. It was just the thing to get Draco's mind pointed right way round again. "So," he made his voice stinging and snide, to break the gloom Potter's words had thrown over them both. "I suppose you expect Severus and me to believe that you've _forgiven_ us then?"

The wind ruffled his dark hair as Potter shook his head. "Not really, no," he said, lips quirking up in that damned smile again.

Draco showed his teeth. "Well we won't be forgiven, Potter," he snarled. "Severus and I won't accept your sanctimonious mercy! We won't just roll over like dogs for you!"

Potter's eyebrow went up, and then the egotistical bastard bloody well _nodded_!

"And what's more, I still hate you, Potter," Draco said. "I don't care if you bloody well saved the world, I hate you, and I always have done!"

"I know," he replied, as though they were discussing directions to the newsagent's. "You stomping on my face that one time on the train made that pretty clear." He tipped his head to the side, and flickered a smile that didn't quite seem as smug as before. "And if I'd missed that, the crucio you aimed at me in the bathroom later that year would have driven the point home."

"Well I-" Draco blinked. "That is." Damn it! "Severus hates you as well! And he isn't going to stop just because you're pretending to be Saint Potter the Perfect now!"

"Yes," Potter said, and shook his cloak out so that the wind caught and furled it wide. "I can't see that changing anytime soon either. So we're done now." He settled the fabric around his shoulders, and suddenly his head was floating, unattached in the darkness, lit briefly yellow as a Hufflepuff badger trundled sparkling overhead.

"See you," Potter said, pulling the hood over his head while Draco searched for something to say, some way to stop him, to make him stay, make him speak, make him stop not bloody _caring_. But then the wind brought the whipcrack air burst of apparation, and it was too late.

Draco spread open his empty hand, trying not to think about how a wizard could use his wand when someone else was holding it, let alone how he could get it to follow him when he left. And all without a word.

He shivered, tugged his robes closer, then jumped as the ridiculous badge clattered on the slates at his feet, its lettering charm frozen on the word "Potter", and fading rapidly to feeble glimmers. Draco took a step back, turned his head as the clock towers all began to ring the midnight hour. It was late. Severus would be wondering where he was, and he-

A last roar of light filled the sky with white fire, and Draco had to look up, awed and appalled at the giant, frosted party cake, with candles fizzing like stars on its top.

"Happy Birthday, Harry," he read the scarlet words that scrolled around the edge. Then he spat in disgust, as the drunken mob in the street below set up a cheer. "You utter wanker," he added, and apparated home to Knockturn Alley as the first the strains of 'For He's A Jolly Good Fellow' began to fill the night.


End file.
